reading WS-Policy: first observation

[Ken Laskey <klaskey@mitre.org>]

A recurring phrase in the Primer is something on the order "use policy expressions to represent combinations of capabilities and requirements".  Seems like policy has been expanded to describe everything we haven't described before.

Note per WS-Policy Framework, 

- a "policy" is a collections of policy alternatives, where 

- a "policy alternative" is a collection of policy assertions, where

- a "policy assertion" represents a requirement, capability, or other property of a behavior.

Note also, 

- a "policy attachment" is a mechanism for associating policy with one or more policy scopes. where

- a "policy scope" is a collection of policy subjects to which a policy applies, where

- a "policy subject" is an entity with which a policy can be associated.

Obviously, any part of a service or service description can be a policy subject.  The question, as noted in current RA text, is how do you discover something and decide to use it if critical policies can be embedded anywhere.

I read on :-)

Ken

P.S. I realize the RA does not directly "use" WS-Policy but if we decide not to be consistent, then we need to make our alternatives and our rationale very clear.

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Ken Laskey

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